Mayors: Do gun research right

Major gun control groups and some Democrats want Congress to undo long-standing restrictions on federal funding of gun-related research, saying they have blotted out objective information on a public health priority.

In a forthcoming report shared with POLITICO, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, co-founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, argues that “the federal government has surrendered its leadership over this area of crucial importance to public safety, shutting down firearm-related research in key agencies and all but allowing the gun lobby to shape our collective knowledge about gun violence.” Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and later the National Institutes of Health have faced restrictions on gun-related research.

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Biden task force on gun control

POLITICO LIVE: Future of assault weapon ban

Top Bloomberg advisers met last week with Vice President Joe Biden’s working group on a legislative response to the Newtown, Conn., massacre, and made familiar recommendations, such as banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring mandatory background checks for all gun buyers and making gun trafficking a federal crime, said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

But the group is also urging the administration to do away with the “Tiahrt amendments,” named after former Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). He was the original sponsor of what became a raft of riders on budget bills that restrict the collection and distribution of crime-gun data by Department of Justice agencies including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And the group opposes restrictions that have effectively shut off most firearms research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the mid-1990s.

How hard pro-gun legislators would push back against lifting the research and data-gathering restrictions is not clear. Several Republican members of Congress contacted for this story either declined to comment or did not respond. The National Rifle Association would not respond to requests for comment, but NRA officials in the past have blasted federally funded gun research as poorly done and biased in favor of greater gun control.

Chris Crawford, a spokesman for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), incoming chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, said it is too early to say what would be included in any appropriations bill but that Kingston believes “that gun control can and should be part of the discussion and that it must also include mental health, the impact of the media and a whole host of factors which could have played a role. We expect those issues that fall within the subcommittee’s jurisdiction to be discussed at our hearings in the coming months.”

The fight over the research dates back to 1996, when, after an NRA campaign against CDC gun-related activities, the House cut the agency’s budget by the exact amount spent on firearms-related research the prior year — $2.6 million. The law explicitly forbade the agency from using funds to advocate or promote gun control, according to the mayors group’s report.

While the provision was not strictly a prohibition on gun-related research, the effect was much the same.

The CDC took notice, and over the next 15 years, funding for firearms-related research dropped 95 percent to about $100,000 in 2012, the report states.

James Mercy, a long-standing researcher at the CDC, told the mayors group that “[p]eople within the Division of Violence Prevention and the Injury Center and among CDC leadership broadly understand that being too out-front on firearm injuries increases the threat to our budget — our budget on violence, our budget on injury and the budget of the CDC more broadly.”

"NRA officials in the past have blasted federally funded gun research as poorly done and biased in favor of greater gun control."

The NRA is a terrorist organization. It is the equivalent of the tobacco lobby: it promotes a product that kills. and kills and kills and kills. and kills. Like any psychopath, it is delusional, destructive, and has created a world view that others challenge at their peril.

Bloomberg and his anti-american zealots will do anything to take OUR rights away! What gets me is these liberal phonies have guns,and are protected by people with guns.They just dont want law abiding citizens to have what THEY can have.Thats called communism.Everybody was warned tha Obama would push his anti-gun socialist agenda if re-elected.

Why would a "health" study have any bearing at all on our exercise of that right?

It would just be a waste of taxpayer money to fund CDC studies of health impacts on gun ownership.

Because of Owebummercare gun owners can't be charged more for health insurance so what impact could any research have?

And please note, THERE IS NO REASON FOR THE FBI TO KEEP BACKGROUND CHECKS. Doing so will *NOT* help crime prevention in any way! The only thing it would accomplish would be the federal government being able to compile a list of private citizens whose property should be searched when gun bans are enacted!

Will never happen you say??? Listen to Mario Cuomo yesterday where he said gun confiscations are possible under newly proposed New York gun regulations.

Why should tax payers fund attacks on America's freedoms? . . . . . Media violence combined with pharmaceutical drugs are the causes of the increased murder rate with youth. Maybe we should stop giving speed to so many of the children. . . . . Obama knows what it is like to be a fatherless child. . . . . TV programs such as "All My Babies Mamas" promotes a welfare state. . . . . Why would anyone with any common sense blame a screw driver or a hammer for murder instead of addressing cultural issues?

A glance at the wikipedia page which describes gun violence in 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... shows a comparison by State, recognizing that differing States have created different sets of gun regulations.

What seems apparent is that the presence of gun violence does not seem to be strictly tied to the presence of gun laws, though gun laws can be a help toward diminishing that violence.

For example, California has very strict laws and had 4.83 gun deaths per population of 100,000. By contrast, Louisiana topped the list with over 10 gun homicides per 100,000. Utah, on the other hand, had 0.93 deaths per 100,000 despite probably having no fewer guns per capita in the population.

This suggests that there could be both socio-economic and cultural attitudes at work in different populations within the country. Stopping gun violence--indeed violence in general-- as a nation will require more than just the regulation of particular types of guns. It will require a national consciousness-raising. Our media and entertainment industries, which strongly affect those among us who struggle the most, must be part of the discussion.

staubreyz2: "Stopping gun violence--indeed violence in general-- as a nation will require more than just the regulation of particular types of guns. It will require a national consciousness-raising. Our media and entertainment industries, which strongly affect those among us who struggle the most, must be part of the discussion."

The first place to start is to have the Marxist Democrats *STOP* pushing social policies that increase the breakdown of the nuclear family and that create "Lord of the Flies" islands in our urban centers which produce uncivilized, unsocialized tribes of youth killing each other over perceived slights and to defend scarce resources (i.e. the drug trade) in their sphere of influence.

Until the Marxist Democrats stop *CELEBRATING* abortion, unwed mothers, and atheism the devolving of our culture will continue apace.

There is nothing preventing ANY organization from conducting reasearch in this area. The only thing it prevents them from doing is stating an opinion at the conclusion of the research. The y can collect data and present it - the conclusions can be made from those utilizing the data. Also, there is nothing preventing private funding of this sort of research --- why doesn't moneybags Bloomberg fund a research project? The FBI consistently presents data on crime - one of the most recent reports indicated that more people are killed by knives and clubs than by rifles. But, I believe that these mayors are looking for a specific result and since they have not yet gotten data that supports their gun control agenda, they are looking for a way to get it. The fact is - gun violence is on a decrease and has been decreasing for over 2 decades. The fact is - most gun crime is not via semi-automatic "assault-style" rifles or with large capacity magazines - these are just the high profile crimes. Most crime is not even via rifles - it is handguns.

What they DON'T want you knowing is the small percentage of crimes committed by people utilizing their own lawfully acquired weapon. Imposing stricter laws on the law abiding public would not, contrary to what control advocates would have you believe, have any impact whatsoever on reducing crime or mass shootings.

stau wrote: "For example, California has very strict laws and had 4.83 gun deaths per population of 100,000. By contrast, Louisiana topped the list with over 10 gun homicides per 100,000. Utah, on the other hand, had 0.93 deaths per 100,000 despite probably having no fewer guns per capita in the population."

Utah has a per-capita rate of gun ownership far above the average, several times the rate of California, yet California has FIVE TIMES the rate of gun-related deaths as Utah. And, going city-by-city you see that over 90 percent of the CRIME-related deaths by guns are in the Democratic strongholds of Los Angeles County and the Bay Area.

Utah has a "shall-issue" CCW permit law (meaning that anyone who meets the training and background check requirements can't be denied a permit), unlike California's issuance of permits only to the politically connected. California's victim-disarmament laws are the toughest in the nation, Utah has nearly none. California doesn't allow open carry, Utah does. California doesn't allow teachers to have guns at school, Utah does.

In Utah, gun-releated deaths are mostly accident, suicide and SELF-DEFENSE (including police-involved shootings), with criminal activity accounting for fewer than one death in sixty. California's DOJ stopped releasing those numbers 20 years ago.

And, if you check Louisiana more closely, you will find that outside of the New Orleans reporting area, nearly all of those gun-related deaths are either accidental or suicide. Many of those in New Orleans are self-defense or police-involved.

"NRA officials in the past have blasted federally funded gun research as poorly done and biased in favor of greater gun control."

The NRA is a terrorist organization. It is the equivalent of the tobacco lobby: it promotes a product that kills. and kills and kills and kills. and kills. Like any psychopath, it is delusional, destructive, and has created a world view that others challenge at their peril.

you are a useful idiot that follows and ideology that kills and kills and kills. you are delusional and destructive to freedom and the Constitution. anybody that is against the 2nd amendment is a traitor to the U.S.

The reality is that people will be violent whether you like it or not. Gun control consistently results in more violent crime everywhere it's been implemented.

Besides that, his statements are preposterous. There is no issue with the numbers being produced by the CDC or FBI. I think MAIG is just jealous of law abiding citizens since so many of them have committed crimes barring them from owning guns.

You want to stop gun violence? You want to save lives? Stop the war on drugs. Or perhaps we should ban hammers unless you are a licensed carpenter. More people got killed last year with hammers and blunt objects than with rifles. I mean really, who needs a hammer except for a carpenter. While we are at it, more people got beat to death with bare fists than rifles and shotguns put together last year. Maybe everyone should have to wear padded gloves and shoes 24/7

It's time for a reasonable discussion about hammer control.

While we are at it, lots of people get hurt by free speech. We should start talking about some common sense restrictions on free speech. Let's throw out due process and search and seizure law while we are at it. Thousands of criminals get away with their crimes because of those laws.

The lack of forthought, and complete disregard for the other consequences of the legislation being discussed is astonishing.